A collection of interests, inspirations, ideas, opinions and outcomes.

There Zine Prototypes

This friday we were given a deadline to have a final mockup of our zine, this meant that I had to have a final zine that replicated my printing process, binding and layout that I was planning to use. Because I was still unsure of what my final design would be I decided to make three prototypes to represent all of my ideas. I chose to use a certain colour pallet for each of them using only blues, oranges and browns (this was the colour scheme I enjoyed the most and was inspired by). I also decided they would all use shapes to highlight the images and text. My advice from last week was mainly to experiment and to try to use a specific colour palette like (for example) browns.

The first prototype was the most similar to my previous mockups in the sense that it used the same shapes (rectangles) and had a white background with exactly the same cover but in the blue and orange/brown colour scheme. This was my least favourite design, the brown/orange was too red although I liked the blue. The white was too stark and make the text too highly contrasted (making it harder to read) I also didn’t like the triangles in the interior of the zine, they looked messy (although evenly placed in my grid). Over all this design didn’t look great, it was quite bland and made the photographs too out of place.

The next zine I really wanted to stand out and be unique, so I started it in a different orientation so that it would look bold. Landscape did offer this and got a pretty good reaction however in my feedback session i relieved a comment saying it looked like a catalogue or brochure. I also think it had spacing issues, the images had to be decreased to fit in, that then left too much space and my text looked very strange in this format. I know the design would have been unique landscape (most zines are portrait) however the design would have been limited and looked a lot less organised. Also this design made the title look too much like a business logo.

For this zine I changed up the colours a little, the oranges was bright with a slight red undertone and the blue had a lot more green in it. This made the zine very intense to look at. The text had to be white which may have impacted the ability to read but I think it read relatively well. I also like the use of the bold triangle shape.

The last zine (and by far the best) used a very different pallet, I decided to use a pallet of different shades of brown to give an aged look without doing the messy job of tea staining the page. I made the background a cream/off white which looked brilliant when printed and made the text a lot less contrasted against the page. I also laid out the images so that they were tilted (but still lined up within the grid) this made the design look almost like a scrap book as the images had a white background rather than clear. I also used rectangle strips to highlight the images in the zine.

This zine worked better as a whole as the colour scheme really gave a nostalgic sentimental feel. It got the most feedback and as decided to influence my final design. The feedback I received was to fine a softer typeface as “Helvetica” was a little harsh and didn’t fit well with the theme. I also noticed an issue where the page numbers interacted with the rectangles oddly which will be solved. I also may add another shade of brown.